Slashdot Mirror
Why We Should Celebrate Snapchat and Encourage Ephemeral Communication
An anonymous reader writes "Within a few months of launching, Snapchat has made an enormous and lasting impact on the culture of communication on the Internet – and we should all be grateful. They have simplified a security process enough to the point that anybody can use it, while validating the market of the next generation of privacy-preserving ephemeral communication. Most importantly, we may finally get a break from the forced permanence of the Facebook and Google world, where everything you do and share is a data point to be monetized and re-sold to the highest bidder."
Just like you can't stop someone from secretly recording a face-to-face conversation, Snapchat tries to enforce as much as possible the demands for privacy: if the recipient stores the message (through a camera screen capture for example), then it is clear s/he is going against the wishes of the sender, and that ultimately could have legal ramifications.
Technically the data isn't transmitted in the clear. You have to do some work to crack its encryption.
"Snapchat has made an enormous and lasting impact..."
And this is the first I've heard of it.
Best slashvertisement. Ever.
Best editing of a summary. Ever.
Lowest point? We should be handing out awards for this shit.
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
How do they reconcile their claims with "Snapchats Don't Disappear: Forensics Firm Has Pulled Dozens of Supposedly-Deleted Photos From Android Phones" - http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/05/09/snapchats-dont-disappear/?utm_campaign=forbestwittersf&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social
"A 24-year-old forensics examiner from Utah has made a discovery that may make some Snapchat users think twice before sending a photo that they think is going to quickly disappear. Richard Hickman of Decipher Forensics found that it’s possible to pull Snapchat photos from Android phones simply by downloading data from the phone using forensics software and removing a “.NoMedia” file extension that was keeping the photos from being viewed on the device. He published his findings online and local TV station KSL has a video showing how it’s done ..."
Opps...sounds closer to fraudsters
"We should be grateful" the summary says.
Well I for one am grateful that we seem to have hit the Slashdot trifecta: (1) Obvious, blatant slashvertisement intended to showcase some product noone's ever heard of, (2) link to a site behind a paywall, and (3) Web 2.0 product that somehow involves social and tracking and profile building, something I would want no part of.
Do I win? And if so, do I get my money back?
If this were Usenet, I'd killfile the lot of you.
This is slashdot my friend. Editors don't actually edit anything.
Editors don't edit anymore because they perfectly know their readers don't read TFS anyway. The only group left on /. holding up to their promises are
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
I have no idea what snapchat is, don't care either, though a couple of weeks back it was something about snapchat's not disappearing, now this - how much is slashdot being paid to run this stuff?
This "stories" has all the hallmarks of some marketing dribble written by Snapchat. It has the right buzzwords, is full of itself, and touts some silly app as the future of the Internet.
When did Slashdot sell its soul and start accepting stories from companies?
As soon as I saw this I laughed my ass off. The reality is that if you send something to someone, they can have it forever. A friend of mine has written apps for both iOS and Android using Cydia Substrate to hook the API calls used to display images and video in snapchat and automatically save them out to your SD card.
It's not possible by definition of how computers work to do something like this securely.
Oooooh. Analog hole? You make it sound so dirty.
Do the editors read the news? I first saw this yesterday morning:
http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-privacy-watchdog-epic-files-complaint-against-snapchat-with-ftc-20130517,0,3618395.story
and if they weren't monitoring/storing snap chat, I would think the FBI would be bitching like they do about Skype...
The 'disable advertising' option appears to no longer be working.
So you can't trust them not to spread your picture but you can trust them to not download a bypass and then spread your picture?
That's not a contradiction. You are looking at the problem in a single moment of time.
Alice trusts Today Bob enough today to not bypass the software OR spread the picture. Alice does not trust that Tomorrow Bob will not spread the picture.
By preventing Today Bob from preserving a copy of the picture, Tomorrow Bob will have no picture to disseminate. Tomorrow Bob cannot alter Today Bob's software. Why would Today Bob be trusted but Tomorrow Bob not be trusted? A nasty breakup could occur between Today and Tomorrow.
If this system were broken by design, then you might want to inform the DoD and the whole process of security 'reading in, and reading out' with regard to access to information. You trust the person today to not make copies of classified information, you also trust them to not attempt to circumvent software controls. That doesn't mean you trust them later, to not want to pass on that information, but you take precautions TODAY to ensure that they don't retain that information in case they change their minds later.
In short: It is possible to trust and not trust a single entity, when the periods of trust and not trust are distinct moments in time.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
WOW...this is amazing!! I cannot believe such a world changing thing has become available to the public!!!!
By the way, what is snapchat?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
(Disclosure: I'm am old bastard myself but I work in the mobile dev world so it's my job to know when things are making waves in the industry.)
The demographic that they appeal to is very, very young. As in teens and college-aged adults. The app itself is extremely popular in the iTunes store and on Android. So much so, in fact, that Facebook, after not being able to buy it quickly (after explosive... truly explosive growth) decided to rip it off and build a clone called, wait for it, Poke.
People declared the end of Snapchat as big bad Facebook was going to eat their lunch, digest their user base and excrete them out into a paper bag to be lit aflame and left on Snapchat's front step. Poke hit around #14 on iTunes, then slide down fairly rapidly and is now an afterthought.
This was a victory for small dev shops that demonstrated that big companies can clone a product but that user loyalty is a very, very real thing.
The enemy of my enemy is quite possibly also my enemy. I've made a lot of enemies.